They Never Discovered Their Powers
by Midwich Cuckoo
Summary: Not all mutants are ever given a chance to discover their mutant gifts. A series of 29 vignettes on those who never found out they were mutants. TCP.
1. Silei Toleafoa

**The concept of TCP – Tales of Common People – belongs to Kelly "Kielle" Newcomb and Phil Foster. TCP stories deal with ordinary, non superhero mutants living in the Marvel Universe. The concept practically died together with the death of its founding mother, Kielle but I decided to take an attempt to resurrect it. It's much more interesting to write about ordinary mutants not belonging to any of the X-Men teams and leading normal life. **

**If there's any thing I can say I own about the world my characters live in, it's they and nothing else. Those stories came into being thanks to the cooperation taking place between myself and my beta Moviemom44 – I wrote them while her task was doing the beta work.**

** This series was inspired by the unfinished "198 Could Have Beens" one by Vine you can find in here. Another important factor that contributed to its being posted here was the thread of mine on the Marvel board which raised the issue of hypothetical mutants who might never discover their powers due to an unfortunate coincidence which made them unable to find their mutant powers.  
**

Silei Toleafoa always wanted to be a mutant. Or at least to establish a connection with one.

Being a direct descendant of the Rapa Nui people, this young woman spent her whole life--27 years--in Hanga Roa, Easter Island. Her life there where she worked as an elementary school teacher didn't exactly abound with exciting adventures, that was for sure. Bored with her monotonous life, Silei devoted the majority of her spare time to reading about mutants. It was one of her favorite free time activities since childhood when the first shy flame of desire to be something more than an ordinary person, more than all the ordinary people she knew, flared to life in her heart. And this desire only grew stronger with each passing year.

The problem was that she wasn't any different than the ordinary islanders whose mundane way of life she hated so much and she was painfully aware of it. As much as she desired the company of others--humans or mutant, who, she KNEW this, must live somewhere on the island--she was too socially withdrawn to find it. Her social inadequacy frustrated her even more than the sad awareness that for all her life she had never been a mutant, nor had she ever met one. Well, she might have, but she wasn't one hundred percent sure. There must have been many mutants even here, on this island forgotten by God and people. She just never met anyone who she could know for sure was a mutant. This thought became her obsession. If she herself wasn't born with the X-gene--she easily came to accept this; the probability of this was small as it was--then at least she should be given a chance to know such people. Why was she denied this?

If Miss Toleafoa lived in a big city with easy access to mental health care, her depressive tendencies and melancholic disposition would be diagnosed as severe permanent dysthymia. Her case would also be recognized as the condition known as 'compensatory narcissism'. In other words, the young teacher from Rapa Nui island desperately wanted to be someone special with a capital 'S', or at least get to know such people, but she completely lacked the skills to achieve this and would have been greeted the notion with an embarrassed smile if anyone ever managed to read her thoughts. Unless, of course, that person was a mutant telepath. There had to be such people here, she knew this, if not in Hanga Roa itself, then maybe in the other parts of the island.

When Miss Silei Toleafoa wasn't reading about mutants on the Internet, in her free time, she took the car and set out on trips around Rapa Nui. On the subconscious level, she knew these attempts were futile--she couldn't expect an X-gene carrier to jump out, out of the blue, right in front of her car, shouting, "I'm the one you were looking for your whole life. I want to be your friend forever and ever."--but she couldn't stop herself from trying again and again, no matter how disappointed she always was when she came back from one of those trips.

And it was the reason why Silei more and more often parked her car on the beaches of the island, with the moai as her sole companions, trying to stare through the space separating Rapa Nui from the closest inhabited island, a place she had neither the money nor the courage to move to. Even those small islands--the Pitcairn Islands--were more than two thousand kilometers away. She'd never get there, let alone to the more distant lands, far, far away, where the X-Men lived. Each time she came to the beach, Silei went into the warm water of the Pacific Ocean. Each time, she went a bit farther. While she was in the water, she would stand for some time, her eyes fixed on the space, still, like she was one of the stone statues the island was so famous for. Then, with a soft sigh, she would come out of the water and go home. Each time she went out farther and farther. And each time she came out tears glistened on her face. One day, Silei went out farther than usual. Hours later, only her car was found. There was no body. Only the moai, silent sentries of the secrets of the island, if they were capable of speaking, could have answered the question of what happened to the woman who wanted to know mutants. Because the members of that particular minority were here, always, in hiding. They had to be. She just never met one.

A couple of months after Silei's last trip to the beach, a group of American scientists appeared on the island, secretly trying to do research on potential mutants who might live there. Among them was a woman with an unusual mutant gift. She could track others of her kind down all over the world, regardless of whether they were still alive or had lived in the past. This mutant was using a device that magnified her abilities. She closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to locate any possible Rapa Nui representatives of homo superior. The machine, which she controlled with the power of her thoughts, started to make silent vibrations and then began printing the results of the mental scanning. The woman spent the next fifteen minutes unmoving before she opened her eyes, took out the printed sheet of paper and showed it to her colleagues:

Mutant scanning in progress.

Mutant found in the area: 1

Name: Silei Toleafoa

Location: Hanga Roa, Easter Island

Status: Deceased

Power: The strong ability to detect mutants within twenty-five kilometers of her location.


	2. Elijah Miller

Elijah Miller's powers made him capable of establishing mental communication with machines--any and all machines and electronic devices. He was able to talk with them in their electronic language as if they were old friends. Another aspect of his power was the ability to steal information from computers--via touch. All Elijah had to do was put his hand on a computer screen and voila!--his head would instantly fill with the bits of information and in only a few minutes he could sort the binary chaos streaming through his brain into usable facts. As smart as he was, there was one concept the eighteen-year-old would have had a hard time dealing with, namely the fact that not everyone could communicate with machines as he could. No matter how much time one spent trying to explain that most people perceived the world as a place where machines are only devices--useful items, to be sure--but not friends, he still would just shrug his plump, tanned shoulders and a surprised look would appear on his face as he said: " So, explain it one more time, how it is to not be able to do it. You say you feel nothing at all then? You say for you to touch the machine is like me trying to contact a piece of rock. Ah, now I understand this comparison, but...I still can't imagine what it is like to not be able to do what I do."

That is, he might have said that if he'd ever had the occasion to have such a conversation with anyone. But he didn't. He lived his whole life in Shipshewana, Indiana, one of the largest Amish communities in the USA and as a member of that community of 'plain people', he never had access to any electronic devices. Not even one.


	3. Peter White

Peter White lost his parents when he was just five years old. Their deaths were far from peaceful; they both died not in their beds, but howling with wild pain that made their bodies writhe in agony when the family's barn became a burning trap with no hope of escape. The building, which once smelled of freshly cut hay and was a safe hiding place for the little boy who used to spend countless hours playing in there with the barn cats, in one moment became a hell of flames devouring everything in their path and leaving Peter, who observed the horror of the scene with eyes wide with pure fear, with a life-long case of mortal fear of fire.

It was his fault.

Nobody ever knew this, not even Jim, his older brother whose cigarette Peter 'borrowed' without his knowledge and then left in the barn, forgetting about it until the moment he saw the first flames and heard the screams. Nobody ever found out. But Peter knew. It was that thought that was engraved in his mind, burned into his brain as surely as the barn with his parents trapped inside had burned so many years ago. For the next sixteen years, there was not one single day when he didn't remember this. He experienced the event from his childhood over and over, never letting it disappear from his memory. There were times when the boy and later the teen and finally the young man, unable to block the flood of unwanted memories, fell to his knees and took his head in his hands, rocking and mumbling, silently begging his dead parents--his parents who were dead thanks to him; he couldn't get the memory out of his mind--begging them for forgiveness that never came. He was the only one now who could give that to himself. But he just couldn't.

He never saw a therapist about this. Instead, he talked to a priest about it, even though he wasn't a believer. He couldn't--just couldn't--force himself to admit that to others, though. He knew they'd hate him as much as he hated himself; they would turn their backs on him. Maybe admitting to the truth would be a cure for his soul, or so the priest tried to convince him, but Peter just couldn't believe it. The only thing he could do was wait until the panic attacks went away--the attacks he always got every time he dared to think about fire. Yes, that was another problem that concerned him--pyrophobia; easier to avoid, but not much less severe than the qualms of conscience biting his soul.

It was his wife--even she didn't know about the secret of her newly-married husband's past--who always operated the gas stove. It was she who assumed the duty of preparing the barbeque parties they organized from time to time. Peter himself hid his fear of fire from his wife, carefully avoiding all occasions when he'd be forced to come into contact with fire. He felt anxious even when he was in the presence of a person smoking a cigarette. Unlike the pricks of conscience that tormented him since that day so many years ago, it wasn't difficult to live with this particular phobia. He only needed to avoid possible sources of fire. Which, in turn, caused him to never learn the truth about his being a mutant endowed with the ability to control fire.


	4. Tomas Lanik

Young Tomas Lanik never discovered that his mutant gift allowed him to turn his body into a stream of living, sentient water. Actually, it would have been odd for Tomas to not have been a mutant--at least to his relatives' way of thinking. The family of the young Czech mutant counted only a handful of non-mutants among its members. His mother and father possessed the power of super strength and shapeshifting, respectively. His older sister, in spite of not having any sort of wings, could fly just as fast as a peregrine falcon. Two of Tomas' grandparents were proud representatives of the home superior species as well, as were many of his aunts, uncles and cousins. Recently, to the great joy of the entire family, it turned out that the boy's first cousin continued to carry on the family tradition, as she inherited her mother's ability to sense human feelings. Everybody was curious about what power their youngest family member would manifest when his time came--because it had to come one day: the blood tests revealed Tomas as an X-Gene carrier.

But that day never did come. Years before his ability could manifest itself--an ability that would have allowed him to survive his ordeal--just days before his fourth birthday, the boy was left on his own on the shore of the Morava River by his irresponsible sister. He slipped on the slick ground and fell, unnoticed, into the rapidly moving current. When they finally managed to find him, on the day that would have been his birthday, his body was swollen and livid. His eyes were already eaten by fish, leaving only the empty eye sockets behind.


	5. Changchang Gao

Changchang Gao could be described as a real Chinese beauty. Tiny and slender, with her delicate, regular features and skin much more fair than typically found in Asians, she was a very attractive woman. Even if she couldn't really be described as young any more – this January she turned 40 and this sudden appearance of "4" which she'd have to put at the beginning of her age for the next 10 years filled her with sad melancholy which always brought with it thoughts on passing. There was only one fissure breaking the picture of perfection - Changchang's legs. Shrunken, motionless and dead, they weren't able to carry her any more since the days of the woman's early youth. Since she was almost 13, Miss Gao moved only using an electric wheelchair , one she could afford only thanks to her relatives who loaned her the money for it.

Changchang met with an unfortunate accident, a car crash, when she was a couple of weeks shy of her 13th birthday. From that time on, the only way she could move was with a wheelchair. She got her first chair a couple of months after the accident when it became clear the teen wouldn't ever be able to walk on her legs again. It was a second hand one and it required a lot of physical strength for Changchang to move it, making it roll down the streets of Dalian, Liaoning where she lived. It wasn't easy at the beginning, but it was the only way she could avoid spending whole days lying in bed.

Years later, when she recalled the accident in which her first cousin died and she herself became a cripple for the rest of her life, Changchang could swear she had sensed something back in the days directly preceding the accident. Some change upcoming. If she ever shared those thoughts with anybody, they would surely say she was being irrational, but she couldn't get rid of this feeling that she was given some premonitions in her dreams shortly before this accident. It was almost as though her subconscious mind created the dream reality to soothe her somehow, to let her know that soon her life wouldn't be as it used to any more. To prepare her for this painful change.

Changchang still could elicit from her memory the extremely realistic dreams she had then – so many years ago, as a girl not much older than a child – the moments of wonderful freedom she was blessed with, when her feet, then still healthy and not covered with scars yet could run faster than any other human or animal could, almost not touching the ground. She woke up from those dreams, excited, sensing some upcoming change which was to happen soon to change her life forever. Some great and wonderful change, making her someone different from other people. She was sure it would be so and impatiently awaited it. So impatiently in fact that she started to walk in her sleep. After the first time it happened, the next morning the girl discovered she was far away from home. She had to walk almost five kilometers on her then healthy and fit legs because she had no money to buy a bus ticket. She was still wearing her simple linen pajamas and trying to ignore the looks of people staring and pointing their fingers at her. She didn't know how she could cover such a distance in one night; she didn't feel at all tired when she woke up. Nor did she know why nobody saw her even if it was the middle of the night – because if they had, they would have tried to wake her up.

The accident, when it happened, wasn't as wonderful of a change as she had imagined it to be. No, there must be some other change awaiting her--she was sure--and she waited for many weeks afterward until finally she lost any hope. She has grown out of those childish fantasies. That's her parents would say if they were able to know her thoughts. And they would probably be right about this, the grown-up Changchang would have thought. Because what other change could her dreams be a harbinger of? You couldn't take them literally. After all, a normal human, healthy or crippled, can't ever expect they'd one day gain the ability to run so fast as to almost not to touch the ground with their feet. Don't you think?


	6. Cheryl Jackson

Cheryl Jackson's nights were always filled with the most fantastic dreams any dreamer could ever wish for. Jack Kerouac's diary of dreams may not have become as well known as his most famous work "On the Road", but still it is a very interesting example of where our sleeping minds can go. If Cheryl ever decided to follow Kerouac and publish her dreams, her dream diary would have been hugely popular. There was only one small problem which prevented the woman from doing this – assuming she'd ever hit upon this idea.

No, Cheryl's hands weren't paralyzed, nor did she have any other physical defect like blindness preventing her from writing the products of her nocturnal imaginings down either. It certainly wasn't that she was illiterate. She was an American, for God's sake, not some uneducated member of some primitive tribe somewhere in the Third World, and could read and write since she was five, due to her parents' efforts. No, the problem was in something else entirely.

There were many nights in Cheryl's life when she suddenly woke up in the middle of the night, panting and sweating, with a horrible feeling that something horrible was about to happen. Since her adolescent years such nights weren't a big rarity. Nights in which Cheryl dreamed about terrible things. Like that dream about the plane hitting a tower which fell and the other tower that soon followed. Or the one about a hurricane striking the south. Cheryl had woken up from it, all covered with sweat, scared to the bone by the visions of the destruction she witnessed, but remembered only that the hurricane had a female name and it began with K. She forgot this dream soon. Even though it did make a big impression on her, the memory of it evaporated from her mind very soon, leaving her only with an unpleasant feeling that she'd had a dream and that it was a bad dream. By the time she woke up in the morning, she didn't remember it at all.

Cheryl Jackson always had many, many dreams. Some of them were about presidents being chosen, some vividly depicted natural disasters ravaging the distant corners of the globe. Outbreaks of new epidemics. Deaths of famous people. New stars of music and movies being born. Yes, Cheryl would have a lot to tell about her dreams to her family when in the mornings they sat at the kitchen table, munching cereals washed down by warm milk. They'd like her stories for sure and advise her half in jest to gather them and publish them in a book. People would find them interesting for sure. Tabloids would find them interesting. There still remained only a small problem, though. Cheryl was among those people who never remember their dreams, forgetting them instantly as soon as she opened her eyes.


	7. Sheila Cowans

Sheila "Brainiac" Cowans was a child prodigy. At least, that's what newspapers christened her--tabloids and serious medical journals alike were always fond of freaks of nature, from calves with two heads to children like Sheila. Her sweet, cherubic brown face, plain but seeming almost beautiful due to her ever-present, blinding smile full of small white teeth, was well known to everybody. Firstly to the readers of local newspapers from her home state of Georgia which were almost salivating over her wonderful abilities and then later, when her fame grew even more, to the whole of America and Europe.

The little Cowans girl could read at the young age of a year and a half, took delight in doing math equations on the third grade level before she turned five and before she was twelve, when she graduated from the local high school with honors, she already had several inventions to her credit. Her photographic memory was compared to those of Daniel Tammett and Salomon Shereshevsky.

"It's unnatural for a person to be so intelligent," her parents insisted. They were only simple laborers who deeply loved their genius daughter but weren't able to fully understand the way her brain worked.

Sheila Cowans was given by nature a wonderful and rare gift of genius but there was one thing she never came to know – it was the mutation which enhanced her cognitive abilities so much. Her smartness wasn't just a natural talent like in the case of many other geniuses. It was the thing about which her parents were right.


	8. Jens Thisted

If you could see this man lying in bed, tossing and turning anxiously in the moonlight falling on him from the window, as if invisible worms are trying to crawl under his skin, you would say Jens Thisted is a hypochondriac. What else, you would ask yourself, do you call a man who every time he passes in the street "feels" their illnesses? Yes, that's what Jens calls it himself – feeling others' illnesses. On any given day, he might feel this woman is infected with the HIV virus, that toddler being pushed by his dad in a baby carriage looks healthy but has Lyme disease, this elderly lady is developing a cold…

Jens himself perhaps doesn't have delicate health and isn't sick often (which shouldn't be surprising; for the last six years he's stayed locked up in his home, going out as rarely as possible so as not to contract anything) but be let's honest-- how would you stand having knowledge of the illnesses of people who surround you? Even if you know it's just a malicious trick your own imagination is performing on you? Too much imagination can be harmful, believe me on this; our Danish friend is the best example. He spends a lot of time online, searching for information on illnesses. Later all that is left for him to do is lie in bed, listening to the noises of the busy Copenhagen street coming through the windows of his bedroom and imagining the viruses and bacteria multiplying in his own body just now. Listening attentively to his own organs and tissues to see if they might betray him, treating him to some mysterious illness which he certainly contracted from that strange man who passed by him in a drugstore today? He had hepatitis A. Common sense would tell Jens he can't be infected by that disease by such a fleeting contact, but the voice of common sense stopped talking to Jens many years ago.

Is there anything else you could be doing while lying fully awake, thinking about the whole wide world abounding with a variety of germs which are only waiting to get you? Any other thought that could occupy your head? No. Illnesses are a very serious matter; I'm sure you agree with me on this. You shouldn't think about any silly things, in whatever direction the tangled paths of your imagination may take you into. In the face of such a severe threat you should devote time and energy only to serious stuff. Like germs. No silly thoughts. No fantasies. Like the one that you may be a mutant with the power to sense people's diseases and heal them by putting your hands on them – if only you weren't so afraid of diseases that you run away from others for fear of what you could catch from them.


	9. Nika Curkovic

Nika Curkovic was always a good Croatian girl. An obedient daughter never questioning her parents' decisions. She never uttered a word of critique of their decision to send her to an asylum, where they hoped the available medical treatments would help her get rid of the voices resounding in their unfortunate daughter's head, scaring her to death. The voices appeared all of a sudden when Nika hit puberty and she heard them only when other people were around. The only way she knew of to block those silent whispers she could hear in her head was isolating herself in her room, far from any living soul until she decided to tell her parents about the voices. She trusted them and was sure their decision to send her to a mental health center was the best in this situation. Nika didn't say "no" to them.

She also didn't say "no" to doctors who kept prescribing her pills after which she felt drowsy and tired although they didn't help much when it came to the voices. They didn't help her about this very issue. Not at all. Until she went to bed, feeling tipsy and strange. That's how the pills worked. You can't hear any voices, real or imagined, when you are asleep.

Nika never cast any doubts on the doctor's other methods either. They were desperate to help her by any means possible. This particular case of schizophrenia wasn't susceptible to any of the ways they tried. So they tried some more. The last one the doctors resorted to was electroshock therapy. It was an outdated form of therapy, but they hoped it would help.

That was twenty years ago. Nika came back home a long time ago. She spends whole days sitting on the front steps of her family house. She smiles sweetly to people passing by, waving to them and forgetting about their existence in the moment after she averts her eyes from them. The therapy destroyed her gift of telepathy before she managed to discover it, but that wasn't all it took from her; it also destroyed her brain.


	10. Matteo Claessens

Matteo Claessens was blind from birth. Inborn glaucoma – that's the name doctors used for this condition. They tried to treat it by making young Matteo undergo such mysterious sounding medical procedures as goniopuncture, goniotomy and trabeculotomy, all of which failed one by one. His disease was discovered too late for anything to be done to save his sight. Matteo himself couldn't remember this but his parents had told him the whole story of how they took him to the best eye specialists in all of Brussels in hopes they'd manage to help him.

It didn't happen in spite of their efforts and now Matteo at the age of fifteen had gotten used to his blindness. He got used to it – but didn't ever fully accept it. He was often told he had beautiful brown eyes with long eyelashes, so similar to his deceased grandfather's eyes but it was just a fact in which the boy had to believe, the same as he had to believe in what people told him about other things he never saw and was never going to see. His eyes could have been orange or pink and yellow striped for all he knew. He had to rely only on what others told him about the world around him. Matteo wished he could see. He often wondered what it would be like if his eyes could see something other than just this impenetrable darkness in which he lived for his whole life. The teen was fascinated not only with the idea of being able to see, but also with the idea of having eyes which actually are capable of doing something other than just being stuck in your face as some long lashed decoration inherited from your grandpa. He often devoted long hours to musing over how much truth was in the old saying that the eyes are the mirror of soul.

His family, teachers and friends told him that you could read a lot from human eyes, that they reflected the feelings you managed to arouse in their owners. The blind teen became obsessed with this concept. He desperately longed for the chance to look in others' eyes to see in them love, fear, surprise, excitation – all those feelings he knew but could never see reflected in another person's face – but he could only touch their faces carefully with his fingers to try to 'read' their expressions. He wanted to control girls with his eyes, by fixing his eyes on them – he could know at last if their brown, dark lashed charm was as strong as he was told – and then observe with satisfaction their smiles – shy at first and blossoming with joy later. The look in their eyes then would be as happy as their smiles, expressing their love and devotion to him.

Even though he _knew_ he would be able to see this if his eyes worked as they should, he would never in his life see this and no girl would ever send him with her eyes a wordless communication that she liked him. He would also never look in the eyes of those stupid doctors who couldn't help him. All they were good at boiled down to the words of comfort uttered to his parents. "We're sorry but nothing more could be done". Neither would he see generosity in the eyes of some wealthy stranger who, softened up by the teen's imploring looks would hand him a purse stuffed with money, saying, "Use this to pay for the best clinic in the whole of Belgium, hell, even in the whole world. Maybe in another country they'll help you regain your sight if those douches here weren't able to do it". It was one of Matteo's favorite fantasies he liked to spin; it always ended with his being able to see the world again, for the first time since his babyhood and since he didn't remember that at all, it still counted as the first time, didn't it?

Or in the eyes of his own family. His parents. His older sister Lotte who remembered their grandfather and often told him how much he resembled him. He had his fair straight hair which was a pleasant contrast to his big, dark brown eyes. Matteo was a handsome boy, so similar to his grandfather when he was his age. Just a spitting image. At least, that's what Lotte claimed until their parents heard this and started to hush her. Their parents didn't like them to talk about him. Talking about this man was forbidden at this home;it was a skeleton in the closet, rattling its bones. Because grandpa was a mutant. He, too, lost his sight due to diabetes a few weeks before his death from that same disease. Prior to his illness, he was able to control people to make them follow his whims by just looking them deeply in the eyes. His blindness made it impossible for him to do it any more.


	11. Sue Ellen Cassidy

Sue Ellen Cassidy won many medals in the days of her youth. Even many years later she was still extremely proud of her sport achievements. Not that it seemed like such a big achievement by itself – everybody who knew her, knew she possessed greater strength, speed, durability and stamina than any other woman. She was always the best of the best, even some of her teammates who envied her successes were forced to admit as much, albeit unwillingly.

Now, many years later, Sue Ellen looked with satisfaction at the medals and trophies standing on the fireplace. The walls of her living room were covered by diplomas and photos – the reminders of the days of her glorious past. The old woman was looking at them with great tenderness, much like the feelings she held for her cherished grandchildren. One of them was playing at her feet now. Little Brenda was special in several ways. She was her youngest grandchild, her only female grandchild and the only grandchild she had full custody of now. Ah, yes, and she was the only one of her grandchildren who was a mutant. That's why Sue Ellen adopted her – Brenda's parents didn't want to have anything to do with a child who at the moment of fear or irritation was able to set the reason of this irritation on fire. They already had three other, normal children. Sue Ellen wondered sometimes how her grandchild came to be a mutant – after all, as far as she knew, there weren't any other mutants in the family. Typically mutations manifested when a young person hit puberty but Brenda Cassidy belonged to those rare cases of mutants who discovered their powers in childhood. In Brenda's case, it happened when she was only two years old. Little Brenda was a very capricious and temperamental child. It was no wonder that not everybody had enough patience for such a child, thought Sue Ellen, as she watched the toddler playing with some small, gray plush toy of undetermined species. Maybe her parents weren't patient enough to treat her with love and respect, but without a doubt I am, the elderly woman thought to herself as she looked at her granddaughter and heard her mutter angrily. Something must have irritated the child.

Mrs. Cassidy bent to see the reason for the child's anger. She looked at the toy the girl was clutching – and her eyes went wide. It wasn't a toy; it was a mouse. A dead mouse. The body was fresh because it still didn't stink but the child managed to tear its tail off. It was the source of her irritation. The woman reached out with her hand, trying to take the "toy" from Brenda, wondering where the heck the child found the carcass and how she managed to miss it.

"Ouch!" she cried out in sudden pain when the girl grabbed her forearm just as she was impatiently taking the dead mouse from her hand. Too impatiently, Sue Ellen thought, I should have told her to just give it back to me. Dropping the animal and catching hold of the wounded arm, she saw that the burn was big, pink and glistening, oozing with a transparent secretion. She looked at it in shock. Never before had the child managed to hurt her. Well, there's always a first time, the woman thought, reaching for the dead animal lying on the carpet. Brenda was still holding its tail with a look of hatred on her small face.

"I want the mousie," the girl stated matter-of-factly, but with a note of iron consequence resounding in her voice. Before her grandmother managed to reply, the child focused the whole power of her gaze and the old woman burst into flames. Nobody heard her screams, the mansion was too far from any other neighbors for them to hear her. Sue Ellen was the only one who was burning so when the human torch who once in the past used to be a medal winner stopped burning, no other thing in the room caught fire. Brenda wasn't even three but her level of control of her ability was already very high.

An article from the "San Francisco Examiner": 11. 03. 2010

"Was Sue Ellen Cassidy a mutant?"

While America mourns the loss of Sue Ellen Cassidy (62), one of the most well-known track and field stars of the 60's and 70's who died last week in a fire caused by her mutant grandchild, the posthumous analysis of the body shows her sport successes in an unexpected new light. The tests show the woman was an owner of the X-Gene which could possibly be the reason of her success. It's impossible to settle what kind of power Mrs. Cassidy possessed, but there appear to be rumors that it could be a low level physical mutation. If it was her mutation indeed, Sue Ellen could have possessed enhanced strength, speed and stamina, but not to such a degree that she could perform superhuman feats that an ordinary human would not be able to do. If that's the truth, there's even a possibility Sue Ellen Cassidy lived her whole life unaware of her mutation, treating her abilities as an ordinary sports talent."


	12. Nyimak

When the whole world you know since childhood is limited to the Sahara desert – the ocean of sand stretching away into the distance – you feel the need for a change, something that would break the monotony of the sand. Nyimak, though born and raised in a nomadic tribe, knowing only the desert missed something else, not fully aware what it could be.

Sometimes she dreamed about a world different than this, about whole tons of water creating the world being the exact opposite of the sand one in which she lived. The water world with fish and amazing green plants trying to grab her by her ankles when she was floating between them, replacing the world of sand. Nyimak was a down to earth woman, hardened by the life conditions she lived in. Even if she remembered those dreams, bringing her amazing freedom she never had, she'd laugh at the silliness of them. The whole world made out of water, ridiculous. How could ever be there so much water, it would have been a terrible waste. Nyimak heard about oceans but she treated the stories about their existence with a grain of salt. She had a hard time to imagine so much water gathered in one place. But this yearning for something, fuelled by the dreams was in her.

The dreams were the only pleasant thing in her life, even if she forgot them after she woke up. She wasn't an attractive woman. She wouldn't have been perceived ugly because the features of her face were relatively regular even if not very finely chiseled if not those two disgusting elevations on both the sides of her neck. The outgrowths disfigured her since childhood. She was born with them and although the people from her tribe got used to them, there weren't too many times when she forgot about them. Sometimes when she dared to touch them, she thought about the world made out of water, she didn't know why. Maybe it was a form of escape from the world in which she was an ugly woman with a disfigured neck to another one in which she'd have finally found desired freedom where nobody would ever pay attention to her ugliness. Of course, those were just fantasies – no one can ever live in the water world, they'd drown instantly, whether they'd be pretty or not.

But those fantasies buoyed her up, making an anchor she could cling to when living in the world of monotonous sand stretching away into the horizon became too difficult. Especially when one year she got really ill. It wasn't the outgrowths taking her beauty away which turned out to be a cancer because they didn't. it was just a pneumonia she got – the nights in a desert are really cold, colder than ocean waters. Nyimak fought for many days but her efforts weren't strong enough to defeat death.

She was buried the next day and the sand of the desert covered the memories of Nyimak – the Sudanese woman who due to the weird whim of the X-Gene in her genetic equipment made her grow gills on the both sides of her neck.


	13. Claire Marie Gravois

"Take this disgusting animal out of my house! Now!"

"But mom, it isn't disgusting, it's just a lizard. Why can't I keep it"?

"I already told you, young man - and in this house my word is law – take this disgusting creature back where you found it!"

"But mom…"

Jean-Philippe pouts, but at age 11 he's too old to cry like a toddler and certainly old enough to understand that his mother isn't going to be softened up by his tears. He takes the animal and with a sigh puts it back in the box he used to bring it home from his friend's house. He expected things to end up this way, but he still hoped that somehow his mother would agree. The boy puts his shoes and jacket on and reluctantly makes his way towards the door, clutching the small box.

Claire Marie Gravois sees her son to the door with her gaze. She shivers a bit at the very thought of touching a lizard. When Jean-Philippe comes back, she thinks, he'll have to wash his hands thoroughly. Claire Marie hates all reptiles from the bottom of her heart. Snakes, lizards, turtles – she would never agree to keep one, regardless of how much her son would try to convince her. She doesn't understand why for heaven's sake the kid likes those disgusting animals so much. He has this guinea pig they bought him last year – a hairy ball of fluff and cuteness but apparently it isn't enough for her son. Even this orange Persian cat, named Garfield after the famous lasagna lover from the cartoon, that her in-laws keep doesn't seem to satisfy the boy's desire for something, well… more masculine.

Claire Marie doesn't understand this desire. She doesn't know how anyone can be fond of reptiles, their loathsome skin covered with tiny scales and beady, never winking eyes. She doesn't like them, doesn't know anyone who keeps them nor has she ever had a chance to encounter a reptile in person in close proximity. Yet, even not being familiar with them she knows for sure she doesn't like them. They fill her with disgust. She will never let Jean Philippe keep any of them. He has this guinea pig and the cat that lives at his grandparents' home on a neighboring street; he visits them every couple of days. It should be enough for him. When this boy returns, she thinks to herself, she and his father will have to talk with him seriously.

Mrs. Gravois doesn't like reptiles hence she keeps away from them. The last time she came into any sort of contact with them - which she doesn't remember at all, knowing about this only from her parents' stories - took place when she was only two and they took her to her uncle who had established a reputation as something of a weirdo in the family. He was a reptile and amphibian lover, can you imagine? He kept them in big terrariums: turtles, snakes, frogs, lizards of all kinds… Certainly as a young child Claire Marie must have been more fond of them because the time she spent in her uncle's house that day was almost exclusively spent in the room where her uncle kept his unusual pets. She had sneaked away, her parents told her, as if she had heard some mysterious call only she was able to hear, only to be found in the company of the amphibians and reptiles. There she was, sitting on the floor, looking at the animals as though she were hypnotized. The eyes of all the creatures were fixed on the child who was sitting on the carpet and from her mouth came strange sounds, like the sounds of some animal language. At least, that's what her parents told her. She looked like she was talking to them – her parents said to her later, amused by this. Quite like she had an inborn gift for communicating with them.


	14. Charles Weeds

Charles Weeds was diagnosed with a very severe case of fine motor issues when he was a boy. Gross motor issues concerned him as well but those were easy to hide from his classmates who were always mocking him. It was no problem to get a physician's note allowing him to skip P.E. class all through high school--where he'd become the laughing stock of his fit, dumb 'friends'. You see, his favorite aunt was a doctor who was always willing to help her favorite nephew.

However, with things like cutting with scissors, writing or drawing, it was a bit more complicated. He couldn't avoid doing those things in school any more than he could avoid the 'intelligent' comments of his classmates who knew he had problems with those tasks and knew how much it flared him up when he was picked on about it. His reaction wasn't surprising; his handwriting was nearly impossible to decipher and his drawings were shapeless messes of zigzags that hardly resembled what they were supposed to be. Charlie thought himself lucky if he got an E in his art class. He was so embarrassed!

Years passed and young Charlie became adult Charles with an aversion for drawing. In the adult world, just like in school, he still had to write something from time to time – to sign some document or something of this kind – but drawing, thankfully, would only have been required of him if he had become an artist, which he certainly did not! Instead, he became a renowned IT specialist, with a particular aversion for drawing. Every time his sons asked him to draw something for them, he sent them to his wife, whose skilled hands conjured up beautiful pictures of horses, houses and soldiers. She was very good at drawing. As a professional painter, she had to be. And although her drawings looked almost as if they were alive, they didn't come to life other than metaphorically. But Charles' drawings would have-- if he'd been able to hold a pencil properly long enough to discover that he was a mutant able to bring life to any shape he put on paper.


	15. John Harlington

The best thing that could have happened to two-year-old Johnny Harlington was being kidnapped by a madman named Christopher Keeling. The mentally ill man broke into his parents' house one night, taking with him the few valuable things that were in the house – some money, Mrs. Harlington's jewelery (the few pieces she didn't manage to sell to buy alcohol), an old radio and little Johnny himself, who was left on his own in his crib when his parents went out with their friends, all of whom were drunks and junkies like themselves. Typically such a situation doesn't end well for the victim, but this case was as different from the scenario presented in "I Know My First name is Steven" and similar works as day is different from night. Keeling was just a basically harmless nutso who wanted to have children of his own. Because of this benevolent criminal's actions, the boy managed to avoid staying with his pathological parents who otherwise would have mistreated him, as they did his sisters who were born after him and had no knowledge of their missing brother at all. The girls were abused by their parents for a couple of years until finally they were taken to an orphanage. They found better families.

Johnny himself found a good family too – better as least than his birth family – in the person of his new "dad" and new "sister" – a girl about two years his elder, who was also abducted by Keeling when she was just a baby. No one managed to find her – or Johnny. Police in fact were sure both the toddlers were killed or sold for drugs by their alcoholic parents. Strange as it seems, Keeling was a good father. Maybe a bit weird. Maybe too reclusive – not leaving the house almost at all until the situation forced him to look for job to be able to afford to buy food. Or until he took his old car to travel across the country, looking for a child he could kidnap. He wasn't in his right mind, but realized the safest option was looking for a child from another state, distant enough not to have to fear the police would find him easily. That was the story with Johnny and "his" other children. Maybe not giving the children too many opportunities to play with peers – any opportunities in fact. Anyway, in the secluded forest area where his hut was and where they lived, there were no other kids to play with or to show them anything about the world outside. In the hut there were no newspapers or TV. And Keeling wasn't too eager to tell the children about anything which was in the world they left behind.

There were no other children for Johnny to play with, except for his "sister" Amanda. At least, that was the name Christopher Keeling gave her to replace the probably Chinese or Japanese name she had before he abducted her, taking her from her crib in a similar manner as he did with Johnny later on. They both spent a lot of time playing with each other for the lack of any other company, not remembering anything from the previous life they led before their new father took them in there. He told them he took them from the bad people – it was all he would ever tell them - and they didn't have any reason not to believe that it was a good thing that happened to them. that their life in the secluded hut in the woods in the Appalachian Mountains, far from any other places of settlement was good. Yes, a good simple life spent together, just the three of them. Or sometimes, from time to time, just the two of them – just Johnny and Amanda – when their father set out on a journey from which he would return a couple of days later, bringing them food, toys or some second hand clothes. Once, he brought them a new "brother". Benny joined the household as a toddler, no older than just a year and half, about the age Johnny and Amanda were when they were abducted. Keeling wanted to have a new child he could take care of – "his" older children were already preteens, way too old to need to be taken care of as he wanted to. Yes, it was a good life, without a doubt. Good simple life for four from now on. Johnny, Amanda, Dad and now little Benny with his very dark skin, curly black hair and big black eyes like pieces of coal in which the innocent joy of life and happiness were glistening.

What was good too was the fact that thanks to Christopher Keeling, Johnny was spared mistreatment and abuse. And not only from his birth parents. Practically the only people he ever had a chance to see in his life were his new "family". Dad Christopher was a Caucasian man; pale, fair haired and blue eyed. He looked very Aryan, although no one ever taught Johnny that word, just as he was never taught anything about the world that existed beyond their small house – about cities, commercials, celebrities, mutants… One glance at young Amanda's skin color and slant eyes would reveal her Asian origin to the observer. Benny was black, with negroid features. Everybody in this small "family" looked different. Being in such racially mixed company and not having anyone to compare himself to besides them, Johnny knew that people could differ and never saw anything strange in his own green scaly skin, webbed feet and hands, frog-like eyes, gills nor yellow hair with green streaks, a bit lighter than his skin. Nothing strange at all.


	16. Chanelle Strasser

**I thought it would be funny to create a net of connections between my TCP fanfics, as Stephen King does with his books. Monica Hollinger, Chanelle's classmate, comes from my other fanfic, "Job Interview".**

Chanelle Strasser was always inclined to think that the sudden outpouring of good luck that led her to a life of wealth and fame was some divine forces' way to compensate her for a childhood spent in poverty. Well, maybe it wasn't extreme poverty, it would be an exaggeration to think about the conditions in which she spent her early years as poverty per se, though no one could argue that the simple existence she led in a trailer park district couldn't begin to compare to the life of a rich actress, writer and ex-model she enjoyed now. This was very different than her former life, which seemed to be millions of years away. In that life, Chanelle wasn't anyone extraordinary. And she wanted so much to be extraordinary, desperately seeking any indication that she had some advantage over others, that she was someone different and better. Like the fact that out of all the neighbors, her family was the only one which kept a purebred Siamese cat named Fluffy. Well, actually it wasn't a purebred one. Chanelle's sister found Fluffy's pregnant stray mother and of the five kittens she gave birth to Fluffy looked the most Siamese, enough so to deceive anybody who looked at her.

Then there was her own unusual name – Chanelle - that gave her an air of sophistication and luxury. Like the Chanel No. 5 perfumes. Chanelle found an empty bottle of the expensive elixir as a child and for several years afterward she liked to hold it to her nose, trying to catch the subtlest trace of scent which still lingered in the bottle. Many years later, Chanelle Strasser would own many bottles of the most expensive perfumes in the world, but she still remembered this first one – the 'visitor' from the different, better world she longed for.

Another distinction she was able to create for herself was the long hair she had as a teen. She let it grow to almost knee length. Chanelle hated this disgustingly long hair, because it was always taking her so much time to comb it, but it was such a good way to attract the attention of others. She was known by everyone at her school as "that girl with long hair". Even people she didn't know personally knew her on sight.

In other words, Chanelle Strasser did everything she could to prove to herself and others that she was someone unusual. Now, many years later, she achieved her aim to become someone extraordinary. Everybody admitted this, even those who didn't like her. Suddenly, an ordinary girl had been raised to the status of a star who succeeded in anything she tried.

She was fifteen when her dreams to become someone better than the people surrounding her were fulfilled. She was discovered by a head hunter from a model agency. It was actually rather unexpected – she wasn't THAT pretty – but it did happen. It was she who was chosen and it was so strange, yet so pleasant. She was surrounded by her friends – some of them were much more attractive than she (though she wasn't an ugly girl, her face belonged to those best described as "homely", really nothing special) but it was she who caught this man's attention. Not to Jessica Lee, not to Eve Howard, not to this new girl in their class Monica Hollinger (she was bitchy but really pretty, certainly much more attractive than Chanelle) but to her, Chanelle Strasser and nobody else.

It was the first propitious smile of fate towards her in the long procession of events which followed. Chanelle's face appeared on the covers of magazines in the whole country for the next couple of years. When she was reaching her thirties which is practically ancient for a model, she got a proposition from one of the most well-known movie directors to star in his newest production. She willingly accepted it… and from a model, she became a famous movie star. One of the most famous in fact. Another stroke of luck. The next years that followed brought her successes and nothing less. The word "failure" didn't exist in her vocabulary. She wrote a children's book which became a bestseller. She was the lone survivor of a plane crash that killed eight others and left her with only a couple of bruises and a broken finger. Though some of the victims had to be identified just by the color of the nail polish they were wearing, she escaped unscathed – one broken finger wasn't too exorbitant price for life. It was in fact this very finger which, strange as it sounds, saved her life once more barely a couple of days later. She was invited to a party, but she rejected the invitation, feeling a bit drowsy from the painkiller she took to soothe the pain in the injured finger. She wanted nothing more than curl up on the coach with a good book and the earphones of an Ipod in her ears – the first Ipods were just entering the market and Chanelle of course had one; she always could afford all new things she wanted to have. At that time, at the party she didn't attend, a tragedy took place. An armed man entered the house where the party was and opened fire. Several people lost their lives and a few others got injured. One of the women was so severely hurt that for the rest of her life she had to use a wheelchair. Chanelle could have been among them too.

She could have been also among the victims of a serial rapist who attacked her a couple of years later. She could… but due to another lucky coincidence, she wasn't. The man had a heart attack and died just as he raised his knife to strike her.

Chanelle was a lucky woman. A very lucky one. Her enemies died or met with mysterious accidents. She, rich as she was, often found money lying on the streets and won even more cash in contests. It was her hobby – entering contests and sweepstakes. Even though she could just buy anything she wanted, that didn't give her the same thrill as entering contests. Too much luck for just one person? Maybe. But these were just nothing, a mere trifle if compared with the real luck hiding behind all of this. The luck that consisted in Chanelle belonging to a very particular minority – mutants. Her mutant power she never was aware of was the ability to alter probability in her favor, but she always thought she was just very, very lucky.


	17. Kevin Montgomery

Kevin Montgomery had an accident when he was six. He slipped on the wet floor in his friend's house and hit his head on the stairs. His bruises soon healed but the brain damage was much worse. It resulted in amnesia which blocked out many important events from his life and left him unable to hold onto memories of many things taking place now. Kevin's case wasn't that bad; he couldn't be compared to Henry Gustav Molaison other than jokingly, but there were many things he forgot and it only got worse with the course of time.

Another side effect of the injury was the boy's problem with concentration. Prior to his accident, he was an avid reader, having learned to read a very young age. He'd liked comics best as a young boy and this didn't change as he grew into a teenager. On the shelves in his bedroom there were plenty of comics – Rising Stars, Watchmen, Sandman. Kevin's favorite comic series was Sandman. He had the whole series and all the spin-offs. Kevin was fascinated with the realm of Dreaming. He often imagined he had wonderful adventures with Delirium and Death – they were his favorite characters. He liked to imagine himself as the boyfriend of those perky, cheerful girls, though if forced to chose only one of them, he couldn't do it. He liked them both the same, though they were so different. Delirium was a bit too unpredictable and childish. Death was more responsible, but due to the nature of her "job" she was also scary, in spite of her cheerfulness. Their sibling Desire was cool too, but Kevin had trouble imagining himself as someone who could be closely involved with this unusual entity – this person was so cruel and calculating… and, what's more, he couldn't even say for sure what gender he/she possessed! In his daydreaming Kevin hung out with the girls from his fantasy in the realm of Dreaming in which their brother Dream was the king. Their other brother Destiny's garden realm, through which the complicated paths of human fate forked and crossed and tangled, was also a place where the boy wandered in his fantasies, trying to get a look at the pages of the Book of Destiny, which, as the stories went, remained unseen even by Destiny himself.

If Kevin could have read it-if the Book of Destiny was real-he would know what the future prepared for him. And this was what he would have seen: a steady worsening of the state of his health; more memory loss and gaps in concentration causing him to be able to focus only on short stories-like comics, even though in the past he liked long and thick books with intricate plots.

There was also another secret that the future held for him – the emerging of a mutant ability he didn't know he had. The teen learned to open a portal to a world completely controlled by the power of his will. When he entered it, this world was just an empty, blank space – nothingness stretching out as far as the eye could see. But only until the boy wished for a change. He could fill the space with any sort of environment he liked, shaping the subtle matter into anything and everything he wished. All kinds of worlds. The post-apocalyptic world with evil robots wandering around, like from the Terminator movies. The Narnia one. And above all, the world taken from Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

The boy spent a lot of time in the last one, with the friends he created through sheer willpower – the Endless siblings, Corinthian, Matthew the Raven, Bastet, Nada – all of them looked just like they did on the pages of the comic. Sadly, however, his mental health started to deteriorate more and more, causing him to lose the memories concerning the events he participated in. Wandering the paths of Destiny's garden, entering the colorful chaos of Delirium's domain or visiting Nada's kingdom, Kevin forgot more and more about who he really was. At the end, he forgot that the dimension he entered through the portal wasn't a real world. Now he spends all his time in the world created in his imagination, thinking he's really one of the Sandman characters, having completely forgotten his true identity – the one of just a mutant reality warper.


	18. Sebastian Wilk

**This chapter, the same as the two next ones, had a new beta, due to my regular beta's being on vacation. It's SirenAlpha who did it – for the first time. Thank you SirenAlpha. Thank you very, very much.**

Sebastian Wilk was the older of two twins. He and his younger brother Konrad – younger by 10 minutes – weren't identical. Similar, yes, maybe the resemblance wasn't striking, but still their faces could be easily identified as belonging to brothers. Sebastian was taller and slimmer, while Konrad's posture was a bit shorter and more stout. Sebastian's hair was dark and wavy, while Konrad's hair was golden blond, quite like their father's. Sebastian's nose was snub and his lips were full, unlike the thin "cut line" of his brother, which he also inherited from their dad. Other than this, the boys bore a resemblance to each other.

Also their personalities were very similar, making them easily get along with each other, though there were differences. Konrad was full of life and energy, a real life and soul of the party. Sebastian wasn't that outgoing; it was his personality to be more reserved and calm. They were really close to each other, just like Jacob and Zachary Handy, the ones who played in Baby Geniuses, the movie their mother liked so much, probably were. Or like Denny and Kenny Scoot from Swirl 360, the band Sebastian liked. Or – to not reach out too far beyond their own backyard – like their country's recently deceased president Kaczyński and his twin brother, the ex prime minister.

But what was the most important thing, the twins were both mutants. They were capable of shooting energy blasts while being in physical contact with each other. The energy expelled by their bodies also made them capable of flight – all the boys had to do if they felt like flying was just hold their hands.

However, this miraculous ability was much less important for Sebastian than the fact of their brotherhood; that his twin and him got along so well with each other. Konrad was a great companion, always so cheerful and full of life. In addition, he was very smart and really helpful when it came to situations Sebastian needed his help in anything. He always did it with such tact that his twin didn't feel embarrassed. Like math – Sebastian never showed the trace of talent for it, while his brother was one of the best students in math class. As a child, Konrad also always had the best ideas when it came to play – he always knew such great games. And when they became teenagers, it was Konrad who, due to his cheerful disposition and outgoing personality, knew so many pretty girls that Sebastian could date. He was this person with Sebastian could talk about anything – a good listener and knowledgeable on many things to boot.

It was at least what Konrad was in Sebastian's imagination. He spent a lot of time, thinking about what person his twin would turn out to be. Long before the powers of the brothers could manifest, Konrad died at the age of three months of SIDS. Due to the lack of the half of this mutant duo, their powers weren't ever discovered.


	19. Tobias Jeffries

It's just an ordinary day for Tobias Jeffries, just one ordinary day more in the ordinary life of the ordinary farmer, who Mr. Jeffries is. The only thing about it which is out of ordinary, is that it is the New Years' day.

But even this fact can't matter much for Tobias – the way of life on the farm didn't change, regardless of what day it is. The domestic animals have to be fed, like every day. The children have to be taken care of, four children, to be precise. His three daughters and a son, who will turn two this year. His older sisters are big enough to take care of him, almost like his little boy had four mothers, not just one. Tobias is so very proud of his children. They are so well mannered and, which isn't unimportant, but for the youngest son, already old enough to help on the farm. Emily turned ten barely a few weeks ago. The twins, Hannah and Abigail, are eight. Good children, yes. One big, happy family, Tobias always loved children and hoped for a big family. He can afford keeping a big family, even twice as big as it is now - he is a wealthy man; the wealthiest farmer in his village.

Tobias Jeffries looks at his house – the biggest house in the whole village - and the new barn, built last year. He has to go there and feed the horses now. This is the only whole year lasting task he has now – taking care of the domestic animals. Now, when the fields are resting, covered with the fluffy white snow, it's his major task on the farm. The first day of the New Year is as pretty as a picture. There's no wind so the day isn't very cold. The snow, a thick layer of which is covering the fields belonging to Tobias, glistens in the sun. The world, at least in this small English village, looks really pretty as on the first day of a new year that just starts. The first day of 1755. And the first day of the rest in the life of Tobias Jeffries, during which he isn't ever going to discover that, similar to his famous distant descendant Madison Jeffries, he possesses the mutant ability to restructure plastic, reshaping it by the mere power of his will.

Ironically, it's the year exactly one hundred years away from the one in which Alexander Parkes makes his famous invention. It's celluloid, the first man made plastic in the whole world.


	20. Tanya Turse

"Tanya, come here and look!"

"What's that, Chris?"

"Look what I found. I knew it must be somewhere here!"

"But what's that?"

"It's that device I told you then. It's that device which detected mutants."

"Ah, the one which your great grandma invented. I never saw it live; just on the photos."

"And now you have the honor to date the great grandson of the woman who invented the most famous invention at the beginning of this century, Tanya, you lucky girl! Give me a kiss. O.K., honey, and now let's put this helmet on that pretty head of yours…"

"Eeewwww, Chris, it's all dusty!"

"Only outside, inside it's clean. Fasten those belts…"

"Chris, what exactly are you trying to do?"

"I'm going to check if my girlfriend isn't a mutant, he, he, he. Come on, put it on, it still works after all those years in the attic. It's the prototype, the first one. My grandparents kept it. Come on, it's going to be fun. It will amplify your brainwaves, showing them on this screen and show me if Tanya Turse is a mutant! My sweet, little mutant girlfriend, he, he, he…"

"You don't need to explain to me how it works. Everybody knows how it works. Christ, I'm so glad I wasn't born in those barbarian times. Can you imagine being a mutant a hundred years ago? It's good now that there aren't many people who believe they are inferior to us."

"Don't worry about mutants, you aren't even one of them. You are eighteen, if you were a mutant, you would have already manifested your powers at least two years ago or earlier, he, he. And now… the moment of truth! Is Tanya Turse a mutant?"

"Chris, I will strangle you! This helmet is dusty! But O.K., now press the button… here it comes…"

"And now, ladies and gentlemen, the magic screen is showing me that… Oh, my God! That my girlfriend isn't a mutant! Hooray for Miss Turse! Capes off!"

"Chris, I will really strangle you! My hair is dusty!"

"Yes, that's the magic mutant dust excreted by the head of my mutant girlfriend! He, he. It's your power, honey."

"Your great grandma must be rolling in her grave now seeing her invention is used for fun by two teens. And now let's go eat something. Rummaging this old attic is boring."

Neither Tanya Turse, nor her boyfriend Christopher Barnwell, the great grandson of Julie Barnwell, the famous inventor of a portable device able to detect mutants almost a hundred years ago, at the beginning of the twenty first century, were aware of what happened that day when, bored, they wandered into the attic of Chris' house. Or rather, what didn't happen. Tanya, in spite of the helmet of the device being put on her head (she decided that she'd definitely murder her boyfriend for his silly idea; now her hair was covered with the dust from this stupid device, eewww) never found out that thanks to the irony of genetics, she was a mutant that the device didn't detect. It couldn't. Her power was a pretty minor one; basically useless though in this very case it worked very well. It made her able to fool any electronic device. Even on the subconscious level, when the girl felt the results could somehow threaten her.

Any device. Including this one.


	21. Dinah Smith

**The beta for this chapter is, in turn, Winterwarrior. Thanks!**

Dinah Smith knew many weird people in her life. Not that there was always something strikingly weird about them from the first glance, but some of the situations in which Dinah saw them exposed their true nature, leaving no doubt for her as for what creeps they were. Like Dana Fielding, this guy she knew in high school. Actually, she never paid attention to him; she even didn't know who he was until her parents started to push on her that she should befriend him, just because they were friends with his parents. Dinah was a pretty shy and introverted girl, so her parents thought finding friends for her would be a good idea.

In their opinion, it would be cute if their and the Fielding's kids were friends, just as they were. They had so much in common with each other – they had to have. First of all, by some creepy coincidence, they were born almost on the same day, with her being older than him by just a day. Anyway, Dana and Dinah – didn't it sound cute? Even their names were similar, not only their birthdates. They would make great pals, that's for sure. They had so much in common, they had to be. That was at least what the Smiths thought.

Dinah's opinion on this was the exact opposite of her parents however. Maybe there was this similarity concerning the dates of their birth and their names, but that was all. She couldn't have anything to do with that creep. In fact, she was completely indifferent to the Fielding's' boy, thinking he was just a normal, average guy from the same school and her parents were friends with the parents of whom she thought was beneath her notice. Until that one day when she saw him staring at her in the school corridor.

It was after classes; he must have been waiting for someone, just as she was waiting for her classmate who had gone to bathroom, because what otherwise would this creep be doing in there? Yes, a creep, no other word would describe more accurately a boy who stares at a girl, breathing in long gulps of air, with a funny look on his frozen face and clutching his head. She was scared for the first moment that he could have some attack but before she had time to ask if he needed any help, the boy pointed his finger at her and howled. He opened his mouth one more time; as if he was going to say something more, but whatever it could be he wasn't given any occasion to do it, because any words that could come out of his mouth were cut by her own. "You are one creepy freak" the teen said, before she left. Her friend already had come out of the bathroom and joined her, so she didn't have any reason for staying with this freak any longer. She left the school and that was how the potential friendship between the – 'ah, that's so cute -Dinah and Dana' – ended before it ever started.

Miss Smith went home, informing her parents that she wasn't a child for heaven's sake to have friends chosen by them. She promised herself that she wasn't going to get to know this nutso closer, regardless of what her parents thought about it. She wasn't going to befriend weird people and it was what kind of person this Fielding boy was. A weirdo. That was what she knew for sure.

The next weirdo in Dinah's life happened upon her three years later. She was in college then. Mary, her best friend back at the time, was organizing a party. All the friends from their band were invited – Lance, Mike, Gina, Sally, Mark, Cathy – and Emily. Yes, Mary had another friend, the girl from her town, who was now in the city, and who was to be introduced to Dinah at the party. Dinah was jealous. She felt Mary shouldn't have any other friend besides her. But she managed to hide the pangs of jealousy, pretending she felt delighted with the perspective of getting to know Mary's friend from childhood. 'Maybe,' she thought, 'this Emily is a great person and I shouldn't behave like a jealous little kid. Maybe I will like her.' Mary, after all, was a very nice person; she wouldn't be friends with someone unlike her –Dinah reflected. 'Maybe I will befriend her too. Maybe…' But any hopes for befriending Emily Rossi got dispersed at the party, with Miss Rossi's first reaction at seeing her was an attack of loud, hysterical screams, followed by her head curling up in her hands with which Emily was clutching it, stopping only for a moment to point her free hand at Dinah.

The aforementioned felt suddenly guilty. She remembered Dana from high school – this memory came out from the darkest nook of her mind suddenly. However, that couldn't have anything in common with Emily's weird behavior, although she couldn't shake the feeling of guilt off herself. Mary tried later to apologize for Emily to Dinah, giving some explanations which were so artificial and just flat out stupid that Dinah decided not to have anything to do with Emily, regardless of how nice a person she could be. Even if she was like that, she was also probably mentally ill or a junkie. She must be something more than just a regular, run of the mill weirdo. If Mary chose Emily for her friend, she was probably a cool girl, but Dinah wasn't going to befriend something with mental problems. Politically incorrect but sincere. Dinah Smith and Emily Rossi were as different from each other as chalk from cheese. That was what Dinah knew. She knew it for sure.

The end of college. The first job. The room rented in the apartment close to the small house which belonged to this Palfrey family with their numerous children. The next weirdo- one of the members of that family. It was one of their oldest kids, one of the girls to be precise. Chantal, that was what her name was. A pretty name, but the girl's behavior wasn't that pretty. She was thirteen and already demoralized. All the Palfrey kids were. The previous week one of Chantal's younger brothers stole another neighbor's purse. The previous month Chantal and her older sister beat up another girl from the neighborhood, just for her looking at them in a way they didn't like. That was what they claimed. Now Chantal was looking at Dinah in a way Dinah didn't like at all. Her pale face expressed concentration. The girl was staring at Dinah with an unmoving gaze… until she gave out a strange sound and fell down to her knees, covering her ears, as if defending herself from some loud, unpleasant sound only she was capable of hearing, and started to rock rhythmically, making those weird sounds expressing the highest suffering. It at least looked like this. Dinah came to the conclusion this teen was really creepy. She was in a hurry to not be late for work so she didn't pay too much attention to the Palfrey girl, who was now sitting on the ground, salivating. A great way to be paid attention to – thought Dinah. But that's probably the best way a girl like her could make up to get others to start being interested with her. Dinah didn't honor the mumbling teen with one glance and went to work as always. She wasn't going to pay attention to creepy teens from pathological families; she had better things to think about. She made her way towards her workplace, not devoting a single thought to Chantal, but for one – 'what a weirdo'. This was the thing she knew about the young neighbor and definitely wasn't going to come to know her closer. She was a weirdo and nothing more. That's all she knew and it was enough.

Dinah Smith knew the people she met were a bunch of creeps. Their behavior showed it to her clearly enough. But still there remained four things about them – and about herself - she never came to know. She had no idea first of all, that Dana Fielding was a mutant having the ability of clairvoyance. At the moment when she saw him then, making faces and howling like a wounded animal, he was trying to focus his power to see their future. Their future together. The Fieldings' also kept telling their son that Dinah was such a nice and reasonable girl; they wouldn't mind if he asked her out from time to time. Dinah didn't know either, that Emily was a mutant as well – the one having the ability to read minds. Emily Rossi, having heard a lot about Mary's new friend from college, tried to discretely probe her mind to check what kind of person she was dealing with. That the Palfrey teen could move objects with her mind. She had developed this ability recently and was trying to make Dinah slip – just for fun, it would be great to see her neighbor falling; she wouldn't ever suspect that it was Chantal who caused it; just one small telekinetic push.

The last thing Dinah never had a chance to discover was that she herself was a mutant as well. She was completely immune to any form of mental influence. What was more, any form of it being performed on her resulted in the person doing it experiencing a horrible pain and a feeling of disorientation.


	22. Lloyd Stowe

Lloyd Stowe wanders the paths of his garden. His gaze, directed towards the rows of the flowers, expresses pride. Starting a garden here, in the heat of Arizona, which seems to flow down from the sky, wasn't exactly the easiest task in the world but he did it. He managed to supply water into the desert. It was hard, but his hard work paid off and now Lloyd can admire the rows of the plants which, in the man's imagination at least, seem to bow their heads down to him, as if recognizing him as their king, thanking him for the priceless gift of life they can enjoy because of his efforts.

Lloyd can't help but smile at the memory of Cathy, his sister, who spent many days grumbling that they should have spent the small sum of money they both inherited from their parents on something more useful. You'd have thought Cathy was paid for all her nagging. As if he tried to convince her that she should gave him her part to contribute to the extension of the garden too, really. But no, Lloyd Stowe was a proud man who didn't want any help from his sister. He spent so much money on the vermin poisons, the seeds and everything a decent garden needs and it paid off – in spite of his being forced to listen to Cathy's nagging. He felt like strangling this stupid woman. But now even Catherine Stowe is forced to admit the garden is beautiful. Even if, to save face, she mutters something about planting vegetables being a much more practical choice instead. But Lloyd, at least now, doesn't need to listen to his silly sister. She went to Texas to visit her best friend and isn't going to come back for a couple of days.

As a result, Lloyd can be alone; just he and nature. He and his garden; his life's work. The whole multi-colored carpet stretching out before his eyes filled with pride. Lloyd was a nature lover since early childhood. He loves to observe nature in all its glory – something no one he knows fully understands. The sky, which the sunset paints with the most amazing colors a person can see. The glossy fur of his pet dogs and cats with all its subtle shades. Flowers the delicate petals of which sway in a wind. Like the ones from his garden. Lloyd can spend whole hours looking at the vast garden behind the backyard of his and his sister's house, greedily devouring the fabulous sight. Those wonderfully vivid colors. This delightful smell. Lloyd loves everything about his garden. Not only the fact that it's the embodiment of his dreams of a garden he always wanted to have, but also the colors of the flowers he is looking at now in silent amazement.

People would look at him in silent amazement too if they knew one thing, something even Lloyd himself doesn't realize. Due to the altered design of his eyes, he's capable of seeing many more colors than a regular _homo sapien_ is. In other worlds, Lloyd's mutation paints the world for him with new colors, making him see it in a completely unique way. This is why he likes his garden and nature in general so much. The flowers from his garden have much more colors than any other person could guess. Lloyd can see all of them – more than two hundred colors and their subtlest shades - far beyond the spectrum visible to someone not endowed with the X-Gene.


	23. Mandy Stampnell

There was the whole alphabet of mysteries surrounding the life of Mandy Stampnell, an ordinary housewife from Wytham, England. Her life and the lives of the people she knew or at least heard about.

It started with A. A like abandoned child. When Mandy was fifteen, some people in her village found a toddler, a little girl too young to be able to tell anyone who she was or who her parents were. She was taken to the local orphanage and for a long time, people speculated on why anyone would leave such a young child all alone in the woods. In fact, some thought that she wasn't even a citizen of Great Britain, because no one recognized her face from the posters. Actually the only difference between her story and the more famous cases of the Boy in the Box and Little Miss 1565 was that this particular little girl was still alive. But her mystery was never solved.

B was for the brutal father beating his daughter for nothing. At least that's what the girl, who was a relative of Mandy's, told the authorities. Some people from Wytham believed her, while the others – knowing the teen as demoralized and her father as a decent, hard working man doing everything to bring his daughter up as a single parent – cast doubts at her accusation. In the end, the girl was taken in by her grandparents who lived in London and no one heard about her any more. Her father – Mandy's close cousin - stayed in the village with his reputation destroyed, forever known as the man accused of tormenting his daughter . And who knows, maybe he was doing something more to her? Who could know it?

C stood for the coral bracelet a boy from Mandy's school got accused of stealing from a store. She knew the boy only by sight but later she came to know him much better – or at least his looks – when the kid tried to commit suicide. He failed, but the whole school soon knew him as that innocently accused boy who tried to commit suicide to avoid not only the stigma of shame that would follow him, but also the punishment awaiting him once the store contacted his parents. They were very strict and the boy feared what they would do.

D was for Dragon Man, the guy who killed three women in the town in which Mandy's relatives lived. She spent her summer holidays there when she was seventeen. The moniker came from the dragon shaped tattoo that the woman who was almost his fourth victim saw on the man's forearm and described in great detail to the police. Although this information would have helped to identify him, the assailant was never found. It was as if he just vanished into thin air.

E was for eczema, a condition Mandy's great great great grandparent had suffered from. A very severe case. Over the course of years, through family tales of his itchy, peeling skin, the truth became warped and his disease went from the more mundane eczema to the highly tragic leprosy. Mandy believed her ancestor had the Hansen disease indeed and wondered how he might have contracted it.

And many, many others. The whole rest of the letters of the alphabet. One letter for each secret. Used many, many times. Many secrets which never were revealed. In the alphabet of the mysteries, there was also the place for F – for Francesca, Mandy's cousin who killed her husband unbeknown to anyone and G for a garden belonging to Mandy's parents from which someone used to steal flowers and H which was for this holiday in one summer in Mandy's life when she got attacked and beat up by someone – but who was it? Nobody knew. The girl didn't recognize the man and he was never caught, just like the Dragon Man.

And many other letters – each representing one mystery in the life of Mandy Stampnell and her friends, relatives and neighbors. Mysteries which were never solved because there was no one who could solve them. No one except Mandy. Her psychometry would easily have solved all of them.

If Mandy had ever touched the abandoned child, the man accused by his daughter, her schoolmate, the place where the Dragon Man attacked his victims or any of the things which used to belong to her ancestors, her abilities would have shown her the truth about all of them. The mysteries would have been solved. Actually, she did touch many of the people and items that were part of the mysteries. But it didn't help.

Mandy Stampnell would love to help. And she would love to find out some of the secrets hidden from everybody, even from herself. Due to some unusual whim of genetics, her psychometry – the ability to know the past of people and items from the time they came into being – was only half developed. To be more precise, it activated in Mandy only when she was asleep.


	24. Aaron Berryman

Aaron Berryman cheated death many times over the course of his extraordinarily long life. A life of a centenarian which lasted as long as one hundred and five years, three months and two days, all of those spent in a good health up until his last days. He had many dangerous accidents in his life, yes, but he was always fit and healthy.

He didn't die as a baby, when a hornet flew into his room through the open window and stung him on his hand. He wasn't sensitized to the venom but a bite of this dangerous insect to someone so young and having such a small body mass can be very dangerous and it was so in his case. Though his life was in danger, he didn't die then and got better soon.

He didn't die at the age of five, when Millicent, his niece, hit him on his head with a wooden horse they were playing with. Millie was just a year younger than him, nevertheless she was his niece. The age difference between Aaron, who was youngest child in the family, and James, his oldest brother, was so great as to make young Aaron look more like James' son than his sibling. The children were playing with each other and during this very play Millie got angry with her uncle and hit him on his head with the wooden toy she got for her birthday a couple of days earlier, so hard that the boy fell unconscious. He had his skull bone cracked and getting better took him a lot of time – the girl hit him with all her might – but he didn't die on that day.

Aaron managed to avoid dying of appendicitis at sixteen. The surgery was long and complicated and the doctors were afraid the teen might develop peritonitis, a life-threatening infection of the internal organs. The surgery was performed at the last moment, they said. Had the surgery been delayed at all, Aaron would have died, but that didn't happen and the boy thanked God for saving him.

At the age of twenty eight, Aaron Berryman had a car accident. Actually, it wasn't very serious; Aaron sustained only superficial injuries – but it could have been worse. Who could guarantee to him that he would get away with it safe and sound? But it happened so. Aaron didn't die on that day.

He also didn't die fourteen years later, when he was severely beaten up by a man who broke into his house. Aaron surprised the robber when he came home and the thief tried to kill him so as to not leave any witnesses to his crime. Aaron managed to overcome the man who was a lot weaker than him physically and called the police. He was lucky that the robber didn't have a knife nor a gun. If he did, he could have been killed by him. Which didn't happen.

In his fifties, Mr. Berryman cheated his own death twice; once overcoming a blood infection and later, barely a year later, recovering from a near fatal heart attack.

Fate didn't have respect for Mr. Aaron Berryman's old age either. As an elderly gentleman, Aaron got shot, had a bad case of flu, fell down the stairs in his granddaughter's house and got bitten by a dog which could have been rabid, but it wasn't. Despite all of this, Mr. Berryman lived to his ripe old age of more than a hundred years.

His three living children, several grandchildren and some of his adult great grandchildren were at his deathbed when the old man was dying. This time was different than in the case of his previous accidents that happened to him. This time Mr. Berryman didn't manage to escape death.

This time was different also due to the fact that he died of natural causes. If he had died a violent death, or at least one caused by an illness, he would have come back to life within the hour. Within a week, the process of his coming back to the most optimal age would have ended as well. He would be immortal – and if he happened to be killed again, the whole process would have repeated itself. But the X-Gene Aaron's body carried didn't program him to come back to life if his death was one of natural causes.


	25. Sean Holden

The idea for this very mutation isn't mine; it was instilled in my head by **Glocktwentyseven **from IMDB who once posted a character endowed with this very ability on the IMDB X-Men III board. The description of this particular mutation is the literal quote taken by me from the profile of the character by the original creator. Thank you.

Ever since his early youth Sean Holden always had two weaknesses. One of them was one for travelling, constantly changing where he lived, not staying in just one place for too long. The continual moves weren't a problem for Sean – he was a freelance artist who could afford this and a heir to very wealthy parents – not actually rich as such but really well-off - who were very supportive of him, to boot.

The second weakness of the man was women. Like Annie, this cute girl whom he met when for a short time he lived in Hayden, a small town in Arizona. She was much younger than himself and not really pretty; just another girl from the neighborhood, but that didn't matter to Sean. She was so intelligent and mature that listening to her melodic voice the man always forgot that actually she wasn't really his type. She was so charming.

But Holden forgot about her as soon as he left Hayden, making his way towards Salt Lake City where his cousin lived. While he was staying in his cousin's house, Sean had an occasion to meet his oldest sister-in-law. Charlene was the exact opposite of Anne; much older than him – actually old enough to be his mother – but bursting with life and energy. She always laughed a lot, making her small, very white teeth shine from behind her full lips, which were always covered with a thick layer of garishly pink lipstick. Sean developed a crush on her. But she soon left, returning to Los Angeles where she lived. This didn't bother the young man too much, as he soon switched over to not one, but two new love interests. Monique and Sandra were sisters, not twins but so very similar to each other. If he had to choose just one of them, Sean couldn't decide. He liked both just as same. But before this friendship could develop into something more, Sean Holden left the city.

He lived in many different cities and towns and whenever he left one for another, he always took the memories of the women he met there with him. Many women. Jessie, a twenty-something bartender from some pub he used to frequent when he lived in Detroit for a couple of months. Holly, his neighbor in New York. She was a widow already well into her forties and with adult children about Sean's age but there was always something sweet and virginal in her, almost as if she was Sean's peer. And later Li Ming, a fresh Chinese immigrant who rented a room close to the place Holden lived in. She spoke almost no English but Sean always found it so cute when the girl was trying to repeat the English words he taught her. Actually, even if Li Ming and her friends Zhi and Zhou Ah who also came from China recently and were often visiting her were completely mute, Sean Holden wouldn't care much – regardless of their very limited knowledge of the language they were so charming, having this exotic charm only oriental women can have. He loved to look at those three young women, devouring them with his eyes. He often wondered what they were saying about him at those moments when they were pointing their fingers at him, whispering something to one another; the whispers soon melted in the outbursts of cheerful giggles. Or Tiffany, the woman Sean met once at a comic fan meeting a couple of months later. Alison, an aspiring model he dated for a short time. Tanya with ginger hair. Tina with buck-like teeth and loud infectious laughter. Many, many women and girls.

And after some time, all of them got pregnant which Sean wasn't aware of every time, having lost contact with them as he moved from place to place. Another curious detail was that Sean didn't even touch any of them – his crushes, his silent fascinations were always purely platonic. He just held hands with them at the very best, that's all. And the babies – boys only - all looked very similar. Similar to each other. Similar to Sean when he was their age. Sean had no idea that he had the ability to psychokinetically activate the fertilization process in the reproductive cells of others. The affected reproductive cell was psionically triggered to begin replicating, and in the process, the blastocyst developed into an exact replica of Sean himself. Along with physical traits, this process also passes along the entirety of his memory up to the point of conception, which has been encoded in his "memory DNA". The babies were born with knowledge and cognitive abilities far beyond what was normal for their age. Upon reaching puberty, each one of Sean's offspring also developed this same ability.


	26. Cindy Salzman

The Catholic nun, Cindy Saltzman, was liked by the community she lived in. A person with such a sweet and nice disposition is always liked, even if she comes from a family of petty criminals known in the whole town for their bad reputations. The older inhabitants of the town still remembered Sister Cindy's brothers, one of whom already went to prison as a teenager for arson. The other one, like their parents, was a thief, but even so, no one looked at the woman patronizingly. They were quite surprised that someone coming from such a background could be so different than their family. She wasn't the only one – there was also Sharon, her older sister who left the hometown years ago and had her own family.

Cindy was so likable, always willing to offer someone a warm smile even if she didn't have anything more to give at that very moment. She could always encourage everybody to do their best in life, even if said person didn't see at that stage of their life any point in doing this. And it wasn't only her religion making her behave in such a way – she was a person whose personality was characterized by an overwhelming need to help others by showing them the best ways to improve their lives. She was always very good at noticing whatever personality traits and inborn skills that would benefit them the most.

Like when she gave Johnny Gardiner the advice that he should start drawing. Sister Cindy saw the sketches he did of her. They were really good – at least for an eleven-year-old boy, which he was then. He wasn't very interested in art back then but sister Cindy contacted his parents, advising them that it would be a good idea to send the boy to a drawing course for children. It would help him develop self confidence which the boy lacked, making him able to impress his classmates. Or when she told Scott, Sharon's oldest grandson that he would be a good writer. He wrote some short stories for his school newspaper and in spite of their not being very long, one could see in them an unpolished diamond being a product of rich imagination of a young writer. They resembled something Ernest Hemingway could have written. The problem was that Scott didn't seem particularly interested in developing his literary talent – until his great aunt talked to him about this. It was years ago though, Scott was quite a famous writer now – not known very well – not yet – but on his best path to achieving this. He was only 23 now but already published three volumes of his short stories. The first of them was dedicated to his "dear great aunt Cindy who was the first to encourage him to start to write".

Then there was John who began a career as a talented painter. He never attended any art school but it was obvious to everybody who knew the boy – now a young man – drawing and painting was where his true talents lay. And sister Cindy realized herself in helping others. In fact, she didn't even realize to what extent she helped some people. Never did she discover that she was a mutant endowed with quite a unique power. By just her presence, she was capable of enhancing natural gifts of the people in her vicinity. Any gifts – for drawing, sports, singing, writing. She didn't even need to encourage anyone. Her mere presence was enough to bring anyone's natural talent to light for all to see.


	27. Byung Soon Garratt

The creator of the idea for this very mutation and the situation that never let the person endowed with it, discover it is **Christy - Flare****.**

The Garratts lived a happy life and nobody who knew them could claim otherwise. Alana and Albert Garratt didn't have any reasons not to be happy. They both were intelligent, wealthy CEOs with a pretty, almost adult daughter who was the apple of their eye. Young Anita Garratt was not only highly attractive – and it wasn't just her parents in love with their only child who claimed so – but also gifted. Similar to her mother, the girl belonged to Mensa in spite of her young age. Both of her parents were very proud of their only daughter.

The only daughter… It wasn't that they didn't want to have more children; they admitted it would be nice if there was also little Annie in their house… or maybe April or Aiden – it would be nice if the names of all the family members started with one letter – but they couldn't. It was almost as if with Anita, so pretty and so smart, their luck had run out. The doctors said that even their daughter being born was a lucky occurrence because they couldn't have more children. But they wanted to and that's why they decided on adopting another little girl. A little girl from South Korea.

It was Albert who hit upon an idea. The idea was followed by the long and complicated adoption procedures and then the Garratts became the proud adoptive parents of a baby girl named Byung-Soon. Anita wanted to replace this name with Angela but finally they decided not to change this name for something more American, leaving it as it was. The baby was perfect in their eyes. Dark hair and eyes, perfect smooth skin. Well, except for those two scars on the girl's back. It was some inborn deformity, the doctors said and it could be removed later on in her life. But they would think about that later, in the future. Now was a time for discovering the pleasures of having a baby at home again. Discovering the pleasures of first smiles directed at them, first words. Every new day was a discovery of something new about the little girl to whom they gave a home.

The Garratts didn't discover only one thing. They knew the baby was born in a small village to poor parents who put her up for adoption because they didn't want to keep her. That was all they knew about her earliest history. The only thing they didn't know was the source of the mysterious scars on her back. If they weren't cut off with an axe by Byung-Soon's father when she was barely a few weeks old – the baby was lucky to have survived the blood loss – they would have been two beautiful wings, covered with snow white feathers. This was what the girl's adoptive parents never found out.


	28. Yamir Dutta

Yamir Dutta didn't remember his parents. Not those human ones, at least. He was way too young when they took him to the Sundarbans near their Bangladeshi village to leave their youngest son for dead in the mangrove forest. They were very poor and couldn't afford to have a new child. Anyway the baby was very sickly and frail; he wouldn't live long the way he was. At least, that was what they thought.

But the baby was cared for by animals. And not just any animals, huge Bengali tigers that dwelled in the forest. Big animals with stripes crossing their soft orange fur. Young Yamir joined them – like some new Mowgli. With time, he started to behave like they behaved. And look like they did. Yes, young Yamir was a shapeshifter, though he never came to know this term. He actually didn't know any words in a human language; he'd never been taught. He didn't know about his own power either. He lived like an animal among animals for many years, not developing mentally like the representatives of the species he in fact belonged to. But he didn't even look like they did.

Yamir Dutta was a rare case of shapeshifter who was capable of assuming the form of only those who were touched by him. Like the tigers which found them when he was lying in the forest, young and abandoned. He subconsciously turned into one having just touched them. And he lived like that for many years afterwards, never seeing people except from a great distance and thinking about himself as a tiger like all the others. His powers weren't ever discovered by him, nor was his actual identity.


	29. Maya Valeriano

Maya Valeriano was always happy and cheerful. Her friends and family knew the teen as a person full of life and energy, bursting with happiness. And she did have every reason for being like that. Being a daughter of millionaire parents who could afford to make all their kids' dreams come true, she certainly could call herself a child of luck.

Not that she was spoiled. An ordinary girl in every respect, aside from the social status of her family. And the color of her hair. Yes, Maya was born with hair which was an amazing shade of green. Her parents didn't expect this but it wasn't as if it changed anything about their feelings for their younger child. In this respect Maya Valeriano was a child of luck too. All she needed to do was keep her hair short and dye it black. It fit her Italian complexion and dark eyes perfectly. Her parents were prepared for Maya to demonstrate some sort of powers after she hit puberty but… well, it actually took place a couple of years ago, but then since then nothing else has happened.

Now, at 19, Maya didn't expect that any powers would manifest in herself. She finished her puberty, after all. It was just her hair – her sole "power". Unfair but that was life. She was a child of luck for her whole life so at some point some higher power had to decide that somewhere there just had to be the critical point. Some mutants just had to reconcile themselves to the fact that their sole "power" was just unusual looks. That's all. In this respect she was like Jazz, this famous rapper she liked to listen to. He was blue all over. It was all his "power". If you can call it a power at all. She was like him.

But it didn't prevent her from being happy and bursting with life. It allowed her to find many friends with whom she could talk about all the issues that really mattered. Maybe but for this small mutant one. But there are always some small secrets you don't share with anybody. Even with friends as good as Maya's who liked her very much. Who wouldn't like her? After all, she was always so nice to spend time with. Not shallow minded though not an intellectual either. Just a very outgoing and friendly girl, always in a good mood. Always. Even when Madison, one of her best friends, died of cancer. And when her beloved grandma followed her in death a couple of weeks later. Nothing could ever destroy her good mood. Some people accused her of insensitivity but she didn't care – the complaining of her acquaintances didn't destroy her good mood either. Nothing could destroy her good mood and cause her sadness.

Her constantly good mood wasn't natural, that's why. It was just her minor (though not that unimportant) mutation – other than just her Polaris-like hair, though Maya never came to discover it. Her brain was naturally wired in such a way that she was always happy. Regardless of the situation she was in, she always felt pure happiness; constant bliss. She couldn't influence others' mood but she herself always was happy. Always. Nothing could ever change it.


End file.
